it's elders time, page-38

Well, is it Elders time or not? That is the question and we don't have the answer as yet.

The market is under stress again and there won't be too many stocks running against the tide in the short term. But that said, Elders lost more than 99 percent of its value in four years. The Commsec graph shows the peak as $28.30 back in June 2007. That figure has of course been adjusted for the restructuring of the shares. If there is to be a recovery now or soon, it does have the capacity to be huge. Just as an example, if Elders were to double from here, it would still have lost 98 percent of its value from that peak.

I certainly don't see Elders going under in the short to medium term particularly as it has had its core debt refinanced and reclassified from current to non-current. The banks would not have been willing and early partners to that deal if there were great concerns about this company's ability to pay its debts.

That then encourages another question: have shareholders overdone the sell out? I certainly think so, and the next few months should give us the answer to that. It is very encouraging that the big institutional sellers appear to have stopped or at least curtailed their selling over the last couple of days. If they were prepared to dump at 25c as that seller with 6m shares did, surely you would be selling out furiously at 28 cents a day or two later if you had any left. Hopefully those big sellers are gone for now. If so, all we need is one of them to take a punt the other way.

I see short sellers sold 802,902 Elders shares on Monday. At the time of writing this the short sale for Tuesday is not there but it will be out in an hour or so, so I have included the link again here.

Short sell list

I would think those sellers would be a little concerned right now. Let's hope they do have to buy back in in a hurry.

GPASAS